Many professions, including military and health care, do post-mortems to learn lessons.

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The military, too, done post-mortems on previous wars to learn from them.

The politicians need to call in the pathologists to help them dissect the recent fiscal mess.

I have never attended an autopsy, and no desire to do so. Still, there are other types of post-mortems that I would like to see more of involving the analysis of failed public policy. Until these become routine, we are doomed to enduring more and more policy failures and economic crises.

There are many professions in which critical examination of failures plays a crucial role in improving outcomes.

The motto of pathologists, the branch of medicine responsible for autopsies, is: "The living learn from the dead." In fact, autopsies in many cases help determine causes of death, which can help solve a murder, or identify some threat to public health. On a more systematic level, hospitals routinely conduct morbidity and mortality conferences in order to understand bad medical and surgical outcomes, learn from them, and prevent future occurrences.

The military has similarly established procedures to learn from experience. The official American and British histories of World War II, include volumes devoted to everything including strategy, war production, and analyses of individual battles won and lost.

Unfortunately, economic policy makers are not subject to the same regular, rigorous self-examination. To be sure, policy makers in the U.S. and abroad have conducted some thorough post mortems. One of the most consequential was the U.S. National Monetary Commission, which was created in the wake of the crisis of 1907. The commission's report consisted of more than 50 volumes on the state of banking and monetary systems across the world.

The commission's report laid the groundwork for the passage of the law in 1913 that led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System the following year. The Federal Reserve Act was a landmark piece of legislation, establishing a central bank for the first time since 1836. The intervening three quarters of a century was characterized by frequent and severe financial panics and a chronically unstable banking system.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a student of the Great Depression, personifies the successful economist-as-pathologist model. Speaking at the 90th birthday celebration for Milton Friedman who, along with Anna Schwartz, famously wrote about how misguided Federal Reserve policy worsened the Great Depression, Bernanke addressed Friedman and Schwartz directly: "I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

Informed by this post mortem of the Great Depression, not only did Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed avoid doing it again, but while the political echelons in Washington have been paralyzed, the Federal Reserve has proven to be more effective than any other arm of the government in combating the Great Recession.

Unfortunately, the politicians in Washington have not called in the pathologists to help them dissect the recent fiscal mess and figure out a cure.

Even though digging through the viscera of Washington's 16-day shutdown and near default would no doubt turn our collective national stomach, it's an autopsy that is well worth conducting.

Richard Grossman is a professor of economics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and the author of the new book, Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them, to be published in November.